China orders drinking water restored

Posted: Sunday, November 27, 2005

HARBIN, China - Visiting Premier Wen Jiabao ordered leaders to restore running water to the 3.8 million people of this northeastern Chinese city, who spent a fourth day Saturday without supplies after a chemical spill polluted the river that provides their water.

The foreign minister, meanwhile, delivered an unusual public apology to Russia for possible damage from the spill in the Songhua River, which flows to a city in the Russian Far East.

Beijing's show of care and contrition was almost unprecedented and represented an effort to restore its damaged standing with both China's public and Russia, a key diplomatic partner.

The government said benzene levels in the Songhua near Harbin were dropping. But it said running water would not resume until 11 p.m. today, a full day after originally planned when the shutdown occurred because of a chemical plant explosion, setting off panic-buying of bottled water in this city of 3.8 million people.

"We are a people's government. We should show a high degree of responsibility to the people," Wen told local and provincial leaders, according to the state television national news. "We cannot allow even a single person not to have water."

Wen promised to "conscientiously investigate the reasons and responsibility for the accident," the report said.

Residents stood in line to fill buckets and tea kettles with water from trucks sent by the city government and state companies. The local government has been sending out such shipments daily, and companies with their own wells have been giving away water to their neighbors.

Beijing has promised to punish officials found responsible for the disaster. Local Communist Party officials and China's biggest oil company, which owns the chemical plant through a subsidiary, already has publicly apologized.

The disaster began with a Nov. 13 explosion at the plant in Jilin, a city about 120 miles southeast of Harbin. Five people were killed and 10,000 were evacuated.

But it was only this week that Beijing announced that the blast poisoned the Songhua with about 100 tons of benzene. The spill is possibly the largest ever of the chemical, a potentially cancer-causing compound used in making detergents and plastics.

The spill has been an embarrassment to Chinese President Hu Jintao's government. Hu has made a priority of repairing environmental damage from China's 25 years of sizzling economic growth and of looking after ordinary Chinese people.

Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing's apology to Russian Ambassador Sergei Razov was reported on the state television news, which is seen by hundreds of millions of Chinese.

"Li Zhaoxing expressed his sincere apology on behalf of the Chinese government for the possible harm that this major environmental pollution incident could bring to the Russian people downstream," the report said.

It was an extraordinary step for the newscast, which usually carries only positive reports about China's foreign relations.

Officials in the Russian city of Khabarovsk, downstream from Harbin, have complained that China failed to tell them enough about the poison that is due to flow into Russia in about two weeks.

Oleg Mitvol, deputy chief of Russia's Federal Service for Supervision of Natural Resources, visited the Khabarovsk region Saturday. In remarks broadcast by Russian television, Mitvol said he had arranged for a quick upgrade of the city's water purification facilities.